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1951

1951 is a simple arcade/puzzle game. Your job is to stabilize the inside of the experimental nuclear reactor.

The gameplay is pretty simple, and I've aimed for a minimalist graphical style.

You do this by merging the particles floating around until their number drops to the target amount. The trick is to only merge particles with similar energy levels.

Merging particles with different energy levels yields instability. If the overall instability level climbs to high, the reactor blows up and you have to restart the level.

You can also double-click around to create pulses to nudge the particles, so that the ones you want to merge get closer to each other, within merging distance.

There are also particles which you can use to modify the main particles without destabilizing the system, which can lead to some puzzling situations.

There's also another type of interesting particle which you might or might not discover as you play through the game. But that is surprise for you, i not tell.

OK I lie. Iz potato.

The game is written in Java, using libgdx and a bit of my personal boilerplate code as a base. The IDE used is Eclipse, and I've mostly used Photoshop for the graphics. The source code is openly available on GitHub!

An Android version will be coming soon, as soon as a timelapse video of the game being created!

Feedback is, of course, always appreciated. ^_^
Best of luck to everyone taking part in Ludum Dare!

I found that sometimes the dragging mechanic didn't work if you weren't quick enough, which ended up killing me on one or two occasions.
Other that that it was pretty fun, combos (suggested earlier) would be pretty cool. The graphics are really nice.
Nice game :)

I enjoyed this. I finished it without knowing you could double-click tho. I feel the game difficulty increases at a good rate, but I felt it ended before it actually became 'challenging'. So yeah, a few (dozen) extra levels which increased difficulty would be nice.

I actually spent an hour browsing wikipedia to try to understand why you named it 1951 so I could go "HOHO! THIS is why you called it 1951", but... I couldn't find any event in 1951 that is related.

@errorage: 1951 was the year the first nuclear reactor was used to successfully produce electricity :D You're in that very reactor. It's an experimental one, which explains why you need to work to stabilize it. (Hey, it's better than calling the game "Math is fun: merge the circles and learn subtractions!" ^_^)

Thanks everyone for the feedback! Here are my responses to the common issues:
- lack of levels = LD48 :(, not that much time on my hands; I'm aiming to launch a post-compo version with more stuff in it, though
- controls: I will increase the size of the bounding boxes around the particles, and also improve the flick detection in the next version
- visual feedback showing that +/- particles cannot be merged when the player tries to merge them
- sfx (shouldn't be too hard)
- music (should be very hard, but maybe I'll manage to whip up something decent in pxtone, who knows?)

Very interesting puzzle game. The graphic style is just great and the puzzle design was good. Just a bit of thinking and trying to clear some levels.

There should be more feedback on which particle you clicked, I would often join two particles I did not mean to join accidentally. Also the double click pulse was a tad too strong, the particles were often flying so fast after that it was difficult to click on them.

Really really nice game. I would've loved some audio to go with it though. Interesting mechanic that could really get polished and improved and you might really have a good candidate for a good touch game for android/iOS/whatever. Good job.

Really well put together gameplay, congratulations!
The game really needs some sound, though.

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